BIG HUNGRY!

Have you signed the petition opposing the president's immigration-ban executive order?

A.  No, because I disagree with it.
B.  No, because I've been too busy trying to earn a living.
C.  No, because I'm afraid the administrators at my school will notice and punish me.
D.  No, because I'm afraid Trump will put me on his "Enemies List."
E.  No, because I'm afraid my students might publicly criticize me for being liberal.
F.   No, because I haven't been sober enough to sign anything during the last few days.
G.  No, because _________________________.
H.  Yes.

Trump's immigration ban triggers panic at universities

"Their whole dreams are shattered," said Dina Katabi, professor at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. "Imagine being in the middle of your new life you always dreamed of, you're doing your PhD -- everything looks well, and suddenly somebody closes the door."

Katabi, who was born in Syria, was hustling to finish a paper with her students Friday afternoon when news of the executive order broke. Suddenly, the work stopped. Shock, disbelief and concern filled the room. Some of her students were born in Iran. On the other side of the country, Sam Haghighi, president of the Iranian Students Association at Washington State University, began receiving a flurry of text messages from friends. "What are we going to do? How are we going to respond? What is going to happen?"

He stayed up until 4 a.m. Saturday, watching an online spreadsheet where Iranians were tracking whether they'd been able to enter the country. The later it got, the worse things looked.

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Contingent Cassandra forwards a petition

In case you are feeling the need to do something in the face of the news of the last 24 hours (or more), here's a link to a petition opposing the recent Executive Order limiting entry into the United States for nationals of seven majority-Muslim countries. The petition specifically highlights the likely effects on academic communities, while also pointing out the ways in which we are connected to other worldwide communities, both large and small:

1. This Executive Order is discriminatory. The EO unfairly targets a large group of immigrants and non-immigrants on the basis of their countries of origin, all of which are nations with a majority Muslim population. This is a major step towards implementing the stringent racial and religious profiling promised on the campaign trail. The United States is a democratic nation, and ethnic and religious profiling are in stark contrast to the values and principles we hold.
2. This Executive Order is detrimental to the national interests of the United States. The EO significantly damages American leadership in higher education and research. US research institutes host a significant number of researchers from the nations subjected to the upcoming restrictions. From Iran alone, more than 3000 students have received PhDs from American universities in the past 3 years. The proposed EO limits collaborations with researchers from these nations by restricting entry of these researchers to the US and can potentially lead to departure of many talented individuals who are current and future researchers and entrepreneurs in the US. We strongly believe the immediate and long term consequences of this EO do not serve our national interests.    
3. This Executive Order imposes undue burden on members of our community: The people whose status in the United States would be reconsidered under this EO are our students, friends, colleagues, and members of our communities. The implementation of this EO will necessarily tear families apart by restricting entry for family members who live outside of the US and limiting the ability to travel for those who reside and work in the US. These restrictions would be applied to nearly all individuals from these countries, regardless of their immigration status or any other circumstances. This measure is fatally disruptive to the lives of these immigrants, their families, and the communities of which they form an integral part. It is inhumane, ineffective, and un-American.

Click link above or here to see (and, if you choose, sign) the whole thing.

--Cassandra

Casual Update from Orange, TX

1. Thanks to Fab, Cal, Bubba, and Cassandra for whatever they've done behind the scenes to make this blog a going concern. If you want to contact them about me or the blog or about horses in general, I presume you know how to email them at whatever email addresses they may have given you in the past.
2. Thanks to everybody who has posted or commented or emailed me. There is a horse near the Sabine River that loves you.
3. One of the emails received this past week at Zooze.the.horse@gmail.com said, "What is the email box at the lower right part of the blog for?  I guess I am not one of the brighter proffies out there.  Is that something I'm supposed to use to send you notes like this?"  And the answer is: I don't know.  Bubba or Fab will probably know.  Good question.
4. The blog continues, indefinitely, to be moderated and constipated.  Just submit stuff.  This is not confusing like the PNAS.  If you want something posted, but without being attributed to you or your avatar, then I'll continue to do that--if your intentions are clear, as they have been so far.
5. I will continue to occasionally split infinitives and steadfastly value the pseudonymity, anonymity, privacy, and dignity of people participating here.  And I like this quote published by POTUS on January 17: "Privacy is more than just, as Justice Brandeis famously proclaimed, the 'right to be let alone.' It is the right to have our most personal information be kept safe by others we trust. It is the right to communicate freely and to do so without fear. It is the right to associate freely with others, regardless of the medium. In an age where so many of our thoughts, words, and movements are digitally recorded, privacy cannot simply be an abstract concept in our lives; privacy must be an embedded value."
6. The "Rules of the Pasture" have been moved over to the right side.
7. Thanks to the people who have emailed to offer corrections to the info on the right side. 
8. And, finally, here's a link to an op-ed written by one of the better former university presidents in the U.S.  I used to work for him.  Bubba did, too.  Make of that what you will.

Your Real Gosh-darned Moderator,
Zooze (the Horse)

Late Big Thirsty: Which student would you prefer to have?

Maybe not fake news, but definitely old news

So (according to a headline in IHE I noticed while reading about student antics in Oklahoma), the American College on Education has released a report entitled Unpacking Relationships: Instruction and Student Outcomes.  I can't seem to find an actual copy of the report (even in the "store" section of the ACE site), so I have no idea what methodology was used, but, according to the press release on which the IHE article appears to be closely based, findings include these gems:

The paper concludes that for students to succeed, they must be engaged in stimulating and effective learning environments. But for that to happen, “faculty need to help students make connections between various learning experiences and the end goals of higher education by supporting student-centered learning environments,” the paper notes.
“Instruction matters,” the paper states. “And higher education needs to provide support for faculty to help students attain outcomes.”

However, the evidence-based instructional practices that have been widely documented as effective in promoting better student outcomes are not widely used, the paper also concludes. It explores five areas of intersection between instruction and student outcomes:

• Transparency: Students must have a clear understanding of where they are going as well as the criteria that will be used to assess that they have gotten there.

• Pedagogical Approaches: Pedagogical approaches, such as high-impact practices and personalized instruction, are linked to enhancing student learning, involvement and engagement beyond simply making the coherence of the educational experience clear to students.

• Assessment: Students need multiple opportunities to practice learning in a variety of situations to facilitate the transfer of knowledge.

• Self-regulation: The active participation of students in their own learning is a necessary component of the relationship between instruction and student outcomes.

• Alignment: The alignment of elements such as content, instructional design, pedagogical approaches, assignments and evaluative criteria is critical to successful learning environments.

“This paper shows the vital role effective instruction plays in student success, what type of practices can have a positive impact and the importance of building institutional capacity to support faculty,” said ACE President Molly Corbett Broad. “It documents a path forward that can lead to higher postsecondary graduation rates and help students and institutions meet their academic goals.”

My first reaction to most of this is "duh."  My reaction to the sentence in red is, well, to see red.  I can't speak for other disciplines (though many of you can, and I suspect you'll say you're doing these things, or doing your best given class size and other conditions), but I do this stuff.  My colleagues do this stuff.  This is very, very old news in composition world (so much so that we've got a decades-old set of basic writing-intensive course expectations and a nearly decade-old faculty evaluation rubric that ensure that we're doing most of them).

BIG HUNGRY!

Q. How do you generally feel about your students?

A.  I love most of them.
B.  I tolerate them because I need a paycheck.
C.  I want to build a huge, beautiful wall between me and the students.
D.  I am puzzled by them.
E.  I get depressed thinking that they are the future.
F.  I spend as much time as possible with them outside of class (e.g., on my porch, at bars).
G.  I've only married two of them so far.
H.  Other:__________________________

O.K. This wasn't the only blackface moment in Stillwater last week.

Over the weekend, a female student [at Oklahoma State] posted a photo of herself in blackface on Snapchat with the caption “When he says he only likes black girls.”

She apologized in several posts on her Facebook page early Monday morning. “I am deeply sorry for those that I have offended,” the student wrote. “My intentions were not at all to be racist. For anyone who knows me, you know I am not racist."

  MORE.

Froderick Frankenstien from Fresno ponders the great questions

My high-school physics teacher was an affable, inconsequential, old bit of fluff. We kids loved him, because we spent lots of time having insult contests, keeping records of the colors of his socks, being moralized to by him, and otherwise goofing off. He was also absent a whole lot: we kids had lots of fun slipping off campus when he was gone.

He divided the physics class up into the "scientific track" and the "non-scientific track." The scientific
track included the handful of kids who would actually use physics in later life, including me. The "non-scientific track" included the other >75% of the class. He clearly put much more time into the non-scientific track: he gave us well-prepared, organized lectures on physics (specifically, kinematics) only twice during the entire school year. We did not cover electricity at all. This put me at a serious disadvantage the next year, when I was taking introductory, calculus-based university physics.

One of the more useful things we did all year was involving all the kids in a debate about whether there should be a ten-year moratorium on the construction of new civilian nuclear plants. It's funny to realize it, too, but in real life, he got over five times longer than he asked for: the first new civilian nuclear power plants in the U.S. ordered since the Three Mile Island accident are under construction now.

And yet, at my 40th reunion, he was remembered very fondly. One of my friends (who despite having been on the scientific track with me has had a prosperous career as a lawyer) even had a copy of the long poem that mentions everyone in the class one-by-one, which he wrote at the end of the year. My friend said of it, "Look at the time he must have spent!" I had to bite my tongue not to blurt out, "I sure wish he'd spent that time teaching us physics!" Aside from this and the nuclear-power debate, the main thing anyone else remembered was the goofing off.

And yet, I was the only kid in the class to go on to major in physics in college. I was one of two in the history of the school to have gotten a Ph.D. in the subject. After all, most of his students benefited more than if he'd taught us all physics, any of which only two of us would ever have remembered.

So, the question is: Was he right, to have served his students in this manner?


While contemplating that, here's another, similar conundrum:

Yerkes Observatory became operational in 1897. When it was built, its 40-inch refracting telescope was the largest telescope in the world. The 40-inch is still the largest refracting telescope in the world: all subsequent largr telescopes have been reflecting telescopes. It was also the last time the largest telescope in the world was built on an essentially sea-level site, since all the subsequent largest telescopes in the world were built on mountaintops.

When opened, Yerkes was without question a state-of-the-art facility. Edwin Frost became director in 1905, and retired in 1932. During this time, he essentially turned the observatory into a country club, with lots of social activities for the staff and their families, but falling away from the forefront of science. Only when Otto Struve became director in 1932 did he turn it back into the scientific powerhouse it was intended to be.

Struve was one of the great builders in the history of astronomy. He founded McDonald Observatory in Texas, building the second-largest telescope in the world in 1939. He founded the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in 1956. He then built up the astronomy department at UC Berkeley into the top place it still is today.

When Frost died, he was well-loved, surrounded by family and friends. When Struve died, he did so alone in a hospital room in Berkeley. While people do refer to Struve as "a great man," I don't think I've ever heard anyone call him a friend.

So, here's another question: Who led the better life: Edwin Frost or Otto Struve?


--Froderick Frankenstien from Fresno

CMU professors study selfies.

You probably then posted the selfie on Facebook, Twitter or maybe Snapchat. But why did you take a picture of yourself? Three professors in the School of Broadcast and Cinematic Arts at Central Michigan University recently studied selfie-taking. They found people take selfies for two main reasons: information storage and entertainment.

More.